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ElcomSoft Back For More
graveyhead writes "Most everyone here should remember the Dmitri Skylarov fiasco last year. Apparently ElcomSoft, the company Dmitry works for, is not intimidated by Adobe or the DMCA. Wired is running this story that describes ElcomSoft's upcoming products, most of which could be interpreted as a violation of the DMCA. What's particularly interesting is that this announcement comes right at the beginning of the trial which is scheduled to begin on August 26."
Their business is in Russia. Russia doesn't have anything to do with the DMCA neither will they ever.
Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.
Why is this interesting?
Trials are expensive. They are going to have to get the money from somewhere.
And Microsoft has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can get away with a lot while you drag out the court case. At least for a while.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Today is a Dilbert mission statement day, clearly. Alternatively, our IT world is falling into a bubble again.
If that Adobe e-book is protected by industry-standard level cryptography, then that industry is in deep trouble.
Why does everyone have to try to do their own "industry-standard" there would have been many valid INDUSTRY-STANDARD cryptography tools with which these problems would not have never even surfaced.
When a corrupt goverment exploits the people for
the benefit of their patronage, the inevitable
result is violence. Injustice is the primary
cause of violence. When injustice is
institutionalized, vigilantism and revolution
are the only recourse.
I know this will bite me in moderation, but
the truth will out.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Sklyarov
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ElcomSoft should thank the US Government for the free PR. I needed to recover a lost Outlook password for a customer and wasn't familiar with any of the available tools. A quick Google search turned up about 1,000 different programs. Which did I trust? The one produced by a company I knew about - ElcomSoft. The tool worked perfectly.
I am sure that I am not the only sale for ElcomSoft that came about in this manner.
Russia has a law on copyright. It has some good and bad points. But it is particularly weird on what concerns software copies. It seems that the guys who wrote this part had a pretty good knowledge on how programs work and interact.
Let me note a few important points:
1. You can reverse engineer a program for private purposes.
You can use the results of your "hacks" on a product you distribute/sell if:
The "hack" does not contain parts of the original software.
The "hack" adds a functionality not contained on the original software or allows third party programs to interact with the original software.
The "hack" does not create a situation where the original author suffers a significative material loss.
There are also a few things in Russian laws that concern protection and privacy and which are related to software products. Frankly, in the whole there are some chances to distribute programs that circumvent copy protection mechanisms if these mechanisms are too dumb and made by nerds. No court will hear you if you cannot prove that you did made a good effort to protect your program, system or network.
The case with ElcomSoft is quite interesting. Even under Russian law they are beating the very edge of the law. But if they can prove in court that Adobe's security does not cost a penny, then Adobe has no chance to shut up these guys. The judicial system is not perfect but in some cases, dumb security is no more than dumb security. Besides Russian law is quite rough on what concerns certain things like licenses. If a software publisher brings a license like Microsft's EULA (even old ones), then court session might end just on reading that EULA. As they do not conform to the copyright laws in Russia.
Not long ago, somewhere around here there was a tremendous copyright scandal between two companies. One company accused the other of stealing their proprietary designs on some web application. When in court, the thing ended in a few minutes. Why? Well these two companies had an agreement to produce a common product. However when things went bad the agreement was torned off and the defendent just grabbed the whole product and started to use it somehwere else. The accusant brought the case to court on the grounds that they broke in the their site and stealed the thing. There were lots of mumblings as what part of the work belonged to whom as the two companies didn't make an effort to clarify its authorship on the project. However, when the court discovered that the defendant had a read/write Internet connection offered by the accusant for their work and that account was still open, the judge just replied with a "case closed" declaration. The accusant tried to protest but the judge explained that if you are so dumb to produce a work and not making anything to protect it, then no court in Russia would hear them. After this the accusant retired its claims and even didn't try to appeal.
I still don't see how this is any different than DeCSS. Except this is a company in Russia instead of an individual in Norway. "Software users are entitled by Russian law to make backup copies of software and electronic documents, exactly what the eBook processor allows owners of Adobe eBooks to do." Why have the courts been so stubborn over DeCSS?
Actually, I think of spam as an annoyance, not as an enemy. The enemy is the one who wants to write laws that limit my rights, and uses spam as an excuse.
I don't protect my e-mail address carefully, so I get a lot of spam. I also don't have HTML turned on in my mail program, and I use a lot of filters, to select out what I want. So I can delete the spam in just a few minutes a day. (Annoying, but not a real problem.) What takes time is all the mailing lists that I subscribe to. I can't read that much, and I know it. But I never know just which one to unsubscribe from.
Spam is a problem for those using poorly designed systems, and poor techniques for handling it. Information overload is a problem for everyone. Don't confuse the two.
That said, I can certainly understand why a system administrator would be more bothered by spam than I am. But they usually use tools like the BHL rather than campaigning for oppresive laws. Except in a monopoly situation, the BHL should be a perfectly appropriate approach. And monopoly situations are so bad that I can't think of any kind of filtering that I would approve of. Sorry sysadmin, but in that case you are working for evil (N.B.: I said nothing about abusive monopoly. Abusive monopolies shouldn't even be allowed to collect their bills. That should be the corporate death penalty, charter revocation, etc.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
is that all of their products are copyrighted.
You're rambling a lot of stuff that apparently has you very emotional, but I don't understand a word of it. What are you trying to say?
There is no correct spelling of this guy's name in Latin letters, only in Cyrillic letters. I'd be interested in how it's spelled in Cyrillic if somebody knows and would like to post... (and Slashdot speaks Unicode...)
Elcomsoft's #1 competitor is Access Data based in Orem, UT. I've known people who worked for them and they say they aren't concerned about the FBI coming after them because the FBI is a major user of their software.
That doesn't change the fact that their software techinically violates the DMCA.
-bk
I think, perhaps, you didn't read my comment.
... well, only for a two computer network.) If you are, then with the concurrence of your customers the BHL, etc. can be of assistence. (Unless you are a monopoly, in which case it would be "with the overwhelming concurrence of you customers".)
Also, I don't like spam, but that doesn't in and of itself mean that any law against it is desireable. Many laws are worse than the evil they seek to prevent, and many of the rest can be so perverted that they become worse. (Legal interpretations can "justify" a lot of things that no sensible person would believe.)
The "postage due" part is an interesting comment, and has some justice. I have previously considered the possibility of charging for bytes sent, but not for bytes received. Then I started considering what this would do to ftp repositories. So perhaps the best solution is to just live with it.
SpamAssassin can be used if you need it. Other tools exist. I, personally feel that this would be a good area for a genetic programming algorithm or a neural network to be inserted, which could filter out the undesired e-mail, and if it could guess accurately enough from the subject, then it wouldn't even need to do the download, just tell the server to delete it.
So far, however, I've found that filtering for what I'm interested in allows me to do a quick scan over the rest, and just delete most of it in jig time. So I haven't bothered with anything fancier. (But, as I said, I'm not a sysadmin
In case you hadn't guessed, I tend to be against government regulation. It so frequently makes things worse, and is always expensive. There are times and places when it is justified, but spam isn't one of them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
and as such it is far above the cognitive reach of
the majority of slashdot readers.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-